Posts Tagged ‘meaning’

Now that you have some tools for accessing your inner self (See the previous blog post, Introspection Part 4), what are you supposed to do once you are “in there” (looking around within yourself)? Answer: find your “inner narrative”—the story you tell yourself about you and your world. That’s really it. Sounds simple, and it can be, but it can also be very difficult to identify the parts of the story that matter to you, that influence your outlook, your feelings, attitudes, values, and your responses to various situations. The good news is that you get to explore these stories as often as you want and as long as you want because you are constantly full of stories!

We all tell stories. All the time. We tell stories to others. We tell stories to ourselves. We do it so often, we mostly don’t know we are doing it. We also constantly revise our stories. The further we move from any given moment, the more our story of that moment is likely to change, as it becomes integrated into the larger story of our lives. You tell yourself stories about what you did today, yesterday, last week, last year. The story you tell yourself (and others) about what you did earlier today is slightly different than the story that was running through your head earlier today. The story you tell yourself now about yesterday is different than the story you told yourself about your day while it was still yesterday. The stories you tell yourself about last year are considerably different than the stories you were telling yourself during last year. See what I mean? Memory is a funny thing. It is complicated. Memory is partly retrieval of our perceptions in any given situation and partly pieces of a larger puzzle we edit to make fit the larger story of our lives. How we feel about that memory, the information it provides us now, which parts of the situation we retrieve—these are all very dependent on the story we tell ourselves about that situation, why it happened, why it is important, and our place in it.

One of my favorite stories about the importance of stories comes from a time when I was a trial attorney. John, a more senior colleague, and I were meeting with the executives of a company, pitching to them the ideas we (John) had about how we would conduct this large case if they gave the case to us. I was fairly young in my career then, essentially John’s “Sherpa” (carried the stuff and got it set up for him). I sat in silence as John made his presentation. John spent the better part of two hours or so going over in fine detail all the likely and possible twists and turns of how the case would proceed to trial once we filed the lawsuit. The meeting was almost over. The presentation was complete.

The executives had asked all their questions, and seemed satisfied with John’s answers. We were wrapping up. Then the CEO asked a final question. He did not ask John. He directed the question to me (remember, up until this point, I hadn’t said much of anything). He asked, “Michael, if you were me, is there anything you would you ask that we haven’t already asked?” In my ignorance of the politics of being subordinate to John, I made the mistake of giving an honest answer. Looking back, I can now see I was supposed to say “I can’t think of a single thing—I think John covered it all brilliantly!” The problem was that John hadn’t covered it all. John had actually failed to cover the most important part of what he should have been explaining to them: the story of their case! I told the CEO (something like the following), “I would want to know, once we get to the trial, how are you going to win this for us, what story will you tell the jury to convince the jury they should decide in our favor?” Silence. Oops! The client redirected my question back to John. John recovered well, as I recall (or at least that’s the story of this situation I tell myself now). He then spent some time explaining how he would reframe the complexities (it was a very complicated case) in a way the jury could digest, understand and believe. The point of my story here is that John had become so focused on the details of the lawsuit, he overlooked the client’s basic need —to be able to get in front of a group of people (the jury) and tell a story about why the client had been wronged and needed to be compensated (given substantial sums of money) to make things right. FYI, we did get the case and the client did get the money they needed to be satisfied.

What is a “story?” At its most fundamental level, a “story” is nothing more than a link between two causally related events. I just took a break from writing this post. Here’s the story of the break. I was feeling shaky, typing with more typos than usual. I had begun to lose track of my thoughts. Something was off. I kept going, though, because I was on a roll and didn’t want to lose my momentum. Things got worse, to the point that I could no longer ignore what was happening. I realized my blood sugar was low (I have Type 1 diabetes). Then, I remembered when I woke up a few hours ago, my blood sugar was at “almost perfect” (perfect is “100” and mine was “113”) and I’d had nothing to eat or drink other than coffee. So, I got up and grabbed a small glass of Mango juice. Now I am back writing. This is the story of my break. In it, I have described to myself (and now you), what prompted the break. I have also told myself the perceptions (more typos), feelings (annoyed), physical symptoms (shaky and weak), observations (memory of earlier normal blood sugar), and attitudes (I didn’t want to stop until I had to). These are the “inner states” I was having during the time of the story. I have made causal connections between those inner states and the likely causes (low blood sugar), and then what I did to respond to and modify the cause (drink mango juice) and the effect (my stability). The result: satisfaction after an interlude of minor difficulty.

You tell yourself similar stories all day, every day. They are not always so mundane or casual. They are most of the time though—mundane and casual. As time goes by, stories become connected to each other. We integrate the stories. We give them greater meaning than they might have had in the moment, as they become part of a larger whole. We form attitudes about them. And then those attitudes in turn change the stories we tell, the parts of the stories we recall. Over time, these attitudes, coupled with the patterns we remember, help us to form meanings about the stories, what those stories mean to us in our larger lives, as part of what we are, who we are, the kind of person we are and the kind of lives we have. I can’t say I will remember this one particular story about needing to take a break to get a cup of juice. I can say that this kind of story is one that occurs daily, sometimes several times per day. Over time, it wears on me. I add up the annoying aspect of having to “always” take breaks, check my sugar, etc. Of course, I am not “always” having to do this. It is a nuisance, to be sure. The way I tell myself the story of my diabetes effects the way I remember the important parts of each of the isolated incidents like the one that happened just now. The way I tell that story and the parts of each of these related I remember then can have a profound affect on how I feel about having diabetes, and even what it means to be “me” as a person with diabetes.

Nearly all therapy approaches have in common getting at the way you tell yourself stories of your self. Three of the most popular therapeutic approaches come to mind that will demonstrate this: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy and Psychoanalysis. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teases out the logic you use in making causal connections between your perceptions to test your capacity to recognize “mistakes in thinking” that can then be “corrected” once identified so you don’t continue to make those “mistakes” to your detriment. A simple and very frequent example of this is when a client takes an “all or nothing” approach to a situation. Say Jennifer has been told by her supervisor that she is getting a promotion, but it will mean changing locations. She fears that she may now lose her job because she doesn’t want to change locations. Jennifer has made the “mistake” of assuming that she has only two choices: take the promotion (and transfer) or lose her job. It hasn’t occurred to her that she could very well just say to her supervisor that she’d prefer to stay in her present position if it means she can stay in that location. The story Jennifer is telling herself about her supervisor’s announcement, what it means, and how it will affect her, all have a significant impact on how Jennifer thinks she can respond to this situation going forward, even to the point of having considered taking a position she doesn’t want due to the way she has told herself the story of her situation.

Psychoanalysis focuses on the way your childhood development, including the relationships you formed during early and later childhood, continues to influence your way of being in the world now. Narrative therapy takes this a step further (and closer to the point of this blog post) by emphasizing that it isn’t only the actual way you developed as a child that influences you now—it is also the story you now tell yourself about your development—that profoundly affects the way you see and feel about yourself and your life now. I regularly use narrative therapy in my practice. It is consistent with my belief that the stories we tell ourselves about our whole lives, all the way from our early childhood to the lunch we had today, become part of an integrated story of ourselves that directs our perceptions, attitudes, values, interactional patterns, choices, and behaviors—everything we are and everything we do. How’s that for a unified theory of the self!

Let’s get back to the point of this post: once we figure out how to look inside ourselves (Introspection, Part 4), what are we supposed to be looking for? Stories. Messages. Linkages. Connections. Plot lines. Subjective experiences and your reflections on those experiences. Ways of seeing the world. Ways of seeing yourself in the world. Ways of seeing yourself interacting with others. The stories you tell yourself about those relationships, those patterns of interactions. Start asking yourself, in any given situation you might remember: “Why do I remember it this way?” “Are there parts to this story that I might not be remembering, or remembering fully, or accurately?” “How do I feel about this story?” “What does this story I am telling myself about this situation tell me about myself, about the situation, about the other people in the story?” “Can I change the story?” “Can I change the way the story tells me about myself?” “Why do I tell myself this story and not another story about this situation?” “How is my story the result of influences from others, now, and in the past?”

A story has many events in it that follow one another in a sequence. This is the plot of the story. The specific events are “plot points.” We chose which plot points to focus on and which to dismiss. How we make these choices is dependent on many things, including previous similar stories and on how we are told by others to identify and connect the plot points. Once you begin to see how you do this internally, you will have a much greater chance at directing this process going forward, instead of continuing to allow the messages others have given you about how to do this to control how you do it. The most important point in this whole discussion is this: just because you do not know you are telling yourself a story doesn’t mean you are not telling yourself a story. So, if you are telling yourself stories about you and your life (and you definitely are), it would be a very good thing to know what stories you are telling yourself and why.

Here’s a possible story. It could even be about you (but maybe not). Let’s say it is Sunday afternoon. You recount your morning. Your morning included getting up, getting the kids to various activities (sports, gymnastics, etc.), then you picked up around the house, did some laundry, and prepared a nice lunch for the family. A productive morning. Something to feel good about. But you don’t. At first, this morning looks a lot like yesterday morning, and yesterday you felt great about the first part of your day. Now, let’s say you were raised in a family that went to church every Sunday, without fail. It was a really big deal. Your spouse doesn’t care about church. It’s an argument if you insist. So you don’t insist. You go to church now only on the holidays. Your mom and sister tell you they miss seeing you at church, wish you would start going again. So, you feel bad about your morning. You did many good things, but in your mind, you didn’t do the one important thing you should have done: gone to church. This is an important part of your story about your morning. It is the thing you are focused on—the one thing missing, the one plot point that should be there, but isn’t. Now that you know this, you can begin to think about which is more important: going to church or letting go of that as an influence on how you should feel about Sundays, and therefore about your life. Knowing this will also influence your behavior. Will you now risk more conflicts with your spouse, or will you resign yourself to the differences you each feel about church and just go to church alone. Either decision is fine, but at least you have greater awareness of something that has meaning for you that has been missing in your life.

Here’s another example. It’s the story about Theresa and her body. Theresa is 48. She is relatively fit. She takes a “spinning class” (stationary bike) twice a week at the gym. She eats fairly healthy, allowing herself only a few desserts per week, and tries to stay away from processed foods when she can. At her recent annual physical, her doctor had only good news about her health, including her cholesterol levels and blood pressure. She has much to feel good about with her body. She doesn’t. She doesn’t like to look at herself in the mirror, especially without clothes on. She fears the scale, and weighs herself once per week, only because she thinks she must. Robert, her boyfriend, tells her she looks great. She thinks he means it. But, still… she feels bad about her body. It isn’t up to her standards. Whenever Theresa thinks of her body, when she sees herself in the mirror, or imagines what Robert sees when they are in bed together, she almost becomes queezy at the thought, shrugging it off as quickly as possible. She is dreading spring break with Robert in a few weeks because she will need to find swimwear that doesn’t look terrible on her. Theresa doesn’t realize that, with each of these thoughts—of herself in the mirror, with Robert, on the beach—she is superimposing on that image what she looked like twenty-five years ago. Theresa thinks she should still look like she did when she was 25. Of course it isn’t rational for her to compare herself at 48 to the way she looked at 25. More than that, though, is the standard she held for herself when she was 25. Back then, she ate very little, went to the gym three or four times per week, and was thinner than what was really healthy. Back then, and now, she held herself to the standards set by Victoria’s Secret, Hollywood, and billboards adorning our freeways with photoshopped women less than half Theresa’s age, all telling her, “if you don’t look like this, you are not how you are supposed to be [insert many other very negative messages].” If Theresa could see more clearly how she is telling herself the story of her body and age subject to the influence of marketers who want her to feel this way so she buys their products, she could begin to accept her body and her age with more grace, and without terrible and unnecessary guilt and shame. This is a simplistic explanation of a complicated problem for many people, especially women, in our society, so I don’t want to trivialize it. Yet, more awareness of this complex set of stories are part of recovering from these constant negative influences.

Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves can reveal reasons we have certain kinds of lingering moods. Someone who tends toward depression might simply tell stories that are overly focused on the negative aspects of their experiences. Someone with anxiety might focus mostly on those possibilities that could be potentially harmful outcomes. If either of these people were able to fill in their stories with more balanced perspectives, their moods might begin to improve quickly and dramatically. A client just helped me think about this (you know who you are). .

When you “go inside yourself” through introspection, look for your “inner narrative.” Start looking at what happens in your life and how you feel about what happens. Start identifying the plot points you remember. Start figuring out why you choose those plot points as your focus, including how you relate them to each other. Think about plot points in the situation that you are not including in your story. Once you have done this, you can ask yourself if your choices about the plot points you remember and connect are choices you want to continue to make. Are they really “your” choices, or are they choices others have told you to make? You get to decide, but only if you know what you are deciding. Your stories become “intentional” (it is your intent that informs how the story should be told, not the intent of others). Once you engage in these practices on a regular basis, you won’t merely have an “inner narrative,” you will have an “intentional inner narrative.” An intentional inner narrative allows us to throw out things like debilitating shame, inappropriate guilt, useless bitterness, and longstanding resentments. When we do this, we begin to clear a path toward accepting ourselves as we are, not as we think we must be or how others want us to be. This is the ultimate goal of introspection and an intentional inner narrative: self-acceptance, which is the topic of the next post in this series of blogs on introspection.

Copyright, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are only intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

Every once in a while I run into a person who tells me they think introspection and self-awareness are a waste of time. I have even on occasion been told that introspection encourages negative feelings about ourselves, by causing us to dwell on difficult issues. I am almost universally so surprised by these ways of thinking about introspection and self-awareness, I find it difficult to respond. Yet, without a basis for understanding the benefits of self-awareness or how to obtain it (through introspection), the difficult feelings and moods it can force us to contend with might seem both daunting and pointless. It seems valid to have a concern about introspection becoming a form of self-absorption. The answer to this issue, though, is not to avoid introspection, but to balance introspection with transcendence. While I believe at a fundamental level that paying attention to your thoughts and feelings and where they come from is vital to living a satisfying life, I also think we need to reach out, to move outward into the world, to “transcend” ourselves in order to become and stay connected to everything outside of ourselves (see my chapter, “Transcendence” in Firewalking on Jupiter). Maybe then, the kind of balance I believe in is one which carries us inward through introspection and outward through transcendence, each as needed, and each as might be beneficial depending on the circumstances we encounter within ourselves and with the world. Readiness and willingness to go in both directions seems an essential part of living a full, rich, and genuinely satisfying life.

Some would say that knowing one’s self has an intrinsic benefit that needs no further justification, that greater self-awareness provides a rich experience within ourselves, and creates an ever expanding space to explore all that life has to offer, that this should be enough for anyone to want to engage in introspection. I tend to agree. I agree not because I am a therapist. Rather, I became a therapist because I had already come to believe in the powerful benefits of self-exploration as necessary for personal growth and change. Even if you don’t agree, there are also very specific and practical reasons to gain self-awareness beyond knowing one’s self better for its own sake.

The corollary benefits of greater self-awareness are predictability and flexibility. By exploring our inner lives, we get a better sense of the way our deeper motives influence our choices, thus allowing us to make choices more in line with how we want to live our lives. Introspection can also help us understand the patterns of responses in our relationships at home, in our communities, and at work, so we aren’t surprised by our reactions to others. This way, we can begin to identify certain kinds of behaviors in the moment and choose to act differently, if warranted, than we have in the past. In fact, this one benefit of introspection is essential to any kind of meaningful change in how we interact with the world. Once our identity (who we are) is set at about the age of 25, it cannot be changed. The good news is our personality (how we interact with the world) and our choices of behaviors can change in some pretty important ways. This change cannot happen unless we understand how we interact with the world and how that affects our lives and relationships. None of this can happen without introspection leading to greater self-awareness.

Introspection is the only way we can step outside of a conversation and “see” it “objectively” to learn how we are “in the conversation.” If we can’t step outside of ourselves and see ourselves more objectively, how can we know what we need to do differently to improve our interactions with others, to improve our relationships, to improve ourselves? We can’t. It may seem kind of funny that to get the outside perspective, we need to go into ourselves, through introspection. Here’s why. Think about any argument or conflict you might have had recently, any conversation that was for some reason mildly or greatly uncomfortable for you. Look back at what they said, what you said. The only way any of that will make sense to you, the only way you can learn from that argument or conflict is to pay attention to why you felt uncomfortable, to explore what was underneath your discomfort. The only way you will be able to get a sense of why the other person seemed to be uncomfortable is for you to pay attention to what you were doing that might have made them uncomfortable. This is introspection.

Jules and Bobbi have a great relationship, but the holidays always put them in a difficult position. Jules doesn’t like to spend time with family at the holidays. He wants to avoid the whole thing. Bobbi is just the opposite when it comes to the holidays. She wants to see her family on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, sometimes the day after Christmas, and on New Year’s Eve. They have difficulty discussing it every year, so they mostly avoid it. Jules goes with Bobbi to maybe one or two family gatherings, but not all of them, and he doesn’t want to stay too long. Last week, they argued about it, again. Bobbi brought it up, said she wanted to know what to expect from Jules, what to tell her family about which events he’d be coming to. He didn’t want to talk about it. They were both uncomfortable. Bobbi ended the conversation (there wasn’t much of one), by asking Jules to think about it and let her know. They watched their “show” that night in an uncomfortable silence and went to bed. Bobbi wants to know what she can do to improve their capacity to discuss the issue. Jules doesn’t want to think about it, or explore it, at all, but is willing to do so to ease the tension between them. I ask Jules about his family. He says they are not close, and most of them live in other states. I ask about his history of the holidays. His responses are short, don’t give me much information. Bobbi confirms that my inability to get anywhere on this issue with Jules is similar to her lack of success in getting Jules to open up about this issue.

At this point, there isn’t much I can do to help Jules and Bobbi resolve the issue of the holidays, for one reason: Jules is not willing to engage in introspection. It makes him very uncomfortable, especially on this issue. He might not even be aware of why it makes him uncomfortable, it just does. I can see no way for him and Bobbi to be able to come to a peaceful and satisfactory resolution of this issue. Bobbi refuses to spend the holidays away from her family, but also wants to be with Jules. That is not going to change, because she has no interest in changing her priorities during the holidays. Without knowing why Jules is so uncomfortable with the holidays, neither of them can make the kind of changes that might be possible if they (especially Jules) had a better understanding of these issues, how they affect Jules, why they affect Jules, and what might put him at ease with them. Is it the gift giving? The religious aspect, like going to Church on Christmas Eve? Is it the closeness of her family? Does someone in her family trigger some deeper historical aversion for Jules? Does their closeness make him feel even more lonely than he already does due to the distance between him and his own family? Any insights into these kinds of issues would be a valuable gateway for helping Jules, and helping Bobbi to help Jules, by giving him the kind of support he might need. As things stand, though, Jules’ unwillingness to explore his feelings, history, thoughts, moods, responses and reactions make improvement impossible. We have hit a wall, and no bricks will be removed until Jules decides to engage in some form of introspection. Bobbi and Jules will continue to either avoid the subject, or have uncomfortable conversations and silences and holidays.

I don’t really have to prove the value of introspection. If introspection had no intrinsic value, we would not be the way we are. For just a moment, think back to my blog post, “Introspection, Part 1,” where I created the image of the conscious and unconscious, in which you are sort of hovering over a pool of water, with bubbles coming up from the water, and bursting out onto the surface, after which you can either pay attention to this or that bubble. The you that is hovering is your conscious self, the water is your unconscious, the bubbles are thoughts, feelings, memories, all kinds of mental states emerging from your unconscious to your conscious. You have considerable control (but not complete control) over how much attention you decide to pay to all of the bubbles, or particular bubbles, as they emerge. If introspection and self-awareness were not vitally important to our well-being, we would simply not have this capacity, this way of being within ourselves. We have this capacity, we are this way, precisely because we need to know why we do what we do. We need to recognize our patterns of interaction, which must include underlying motivations for our decisions, if we are going to be able to predict the way those patterns will influence us in the future, how they will compel us to act in certain ways when we encounter certain kinds of situations. Introspection gives us this kind of predictability—the ability to predict how we, ourselves, will want to behave in the future to have a greater chance of obtaining whatever it is we seek. If we are not willing to do this, to explore ourselves, to look at those bubbles and pay attention to the important ones, we will be stuck, lost, confused, always waiting until the next uncomfortable situation, wondering without understanding why we are uncomfortable, and what can be done to make us less uncomfortable the next time. We will be like Jules, and all of the people around us will be like Bobbi, puzzled and frustrated by our inability to understand, cope, communicate or change.

In my book, Firewalking on Jupiter, in the Chapter, “Mental Illness, Part 2” I defined “mental health” as: “a state in which a person is able and willing to address every aspect of their inner life, regardless of whether they experience difficult feelings, including fear, while addressing those aspects of their inner life.” So, I guess you could say that my way of describing what it means to be “mentally healthy” is to regularly engage in introspection at whatever depth is required at any given point in time, to improve our capacity to know our triggers, motivations, and behaviors (predictability) so we can then make better choices in moments that matter to us and our relationships (flexibility). For a deeper discussion on the benefits of flexibility, you may want to read the three chapters on this topic in Firewalking on Jupiter, including the first part, which is aptly called “Flexibility is the hallmark of mental health.” Here, though, I will merely emphasize that flexibility allows us to make different kinds of choices. We won’t know which kinds of choices are available unless we know our own limits and capabilities. To know this, we must know ourselves, through introspection.

Now that I have shed some light on the benefits of introspection, in the next blog post on this topic, I will try to explain why people often avoid introspection despite what seems to me to be its obvious benefits.

Copyright, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are only intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

A friend recently read my book, Firewalking on Jupiter. He liked it. He thought it was useful in a variety of ways. He thought the book did a pretty good job of explaining how to address different issues you might need to address depending on who you are and what you discover about yourself—things like guilt, anxiety, anger, shame, loss, lack of meaning, and identity. I do not take it for granted that someone who reads my book will enjoy it or find it useful, so it was nice to hear all of this. Then he said something I hadn’t heard before, or thought about really at all. He told me the book made the assumption that those who read it already know what introspection is, how to do introspection, have sufficient self-awareness to identify their issues, and are fairly far down the road of believing in the value of both introspection and self-awareness.

I will admit, I was stunned. I realized right away that there was no part of the book that actually went through the process of what introspection is and how to do introspection. My oversight is based on two circumstances. First, I had been engaged in the various acts of introspection for so long in my own life, I made the mistake of assuming those reading my book would already be well acquainted with it. My long history of doing introspection goes all the way back to when I was a teenager, in drug treatment, learning about the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (I’ll get back to that in a later part of this series of blog posts, as part of my explanation for how to do introspection). The other reason is that I had been practicing therapy with clients for 10 years when I put the book together, so I made the mistaken assumption that my audience would be people already engaged in therapy, either with me or someone else, well on their way to understanding how to incorporate introspection into their daily lives.

This, then, is the first in what will be a series of blog posts that will explain the basics of introspection, including what it is, how to start, how to maintain it, various tools you can use to help you along, and also the benefits of introspection, which is greater self-awareness, hopefully leading to positive change and growth.

Let’s start by defining “introspection.” Dictionary.com defines “introspection” as: the “observation or examination of one’s own mental and emotional state, mental processes, etc.; the act of looking within oneself.” In its simplest terms, introspection means “self-examination” (on an emotional, mental, and perhaps spiritual level). At some basic level, we all engage in self-examination all the time. We must. We are constantly having conversations with ourselves inside our heads. By participating in these conversations, we are at some level “looking within one’s self.” Are we really paying attention to the conversations though? Are we asking ourselves why the conversations we are having at any given moment are headed in one direction, and not another? Have we considered other aspects of our inner self that might help explain why that particular conversation is happening at all? Only when we take the time, the energy, and the “stance” of stepping outside of our internal conversations to look more closely at them are we truly engaged in the act of introspection. We aren’t just “having” the conversation with ourselves. When we are introspective, we are “examining” that conversation and the other inner states that underlie or influence that conversation.

It has always seemed helpful to me to think of our minds as having at least two primary layers: the conscious layer (what we are aware of at any given moment) and the unconscious layer (the murky place where thoughts and feelings come from before we are aware of them). When I think of these layers, I also like to think of thoughts and feelings, ideas, moods, and perceptions as things that “percolate” within us. Think of the conscious part of yourself sort of hovering above some water. The water is murky, not clear. You can’t really see too far under the surface of the water, but you can tell there are things moving around under the water. There are constantly bubbles “percolating” to the surface, and then ideas and thoughts and perceptions and feelings inside these bubbles emerge, coming to the surface for you to consider, to explore further, or ignore.

A related idea for how we exist within ourselves is to think of two kinds of selves within each of us. There is the “observer” self and the “observed” self. The observer self can sort of see or watch what we are thinking, feeling, or doing. The observed self is the part of us that is doing the thinking, the feeling or the doing. Imagine any activity you’ve done, and this will be true. Let’s say you are gardening. You are planting a small tree. You are completely engrossed in it, thinking and feeling little else other than the act of digging a hole, putting the dirt aside, putting water in the hole, removing the roots from the container, separating them a bit, putting the roots in the hole and adding soil around them. This whole time, you might be having momentary and fleeting thoughts about other things, including how you will spend the rest of your day, a walk or a bike ride later, dinner plans, but they come and go with little attention. Your mind hasn’t even been paying attention to your thoughts, either about the tree or anything else. The observer part of you has essentially merged with the observed part of you. There is something even sort of relieving about this kind of work due to the very fact that it is so engrossing. You are giving your observer self a break. Then, you pause from your work, you assess what you’ve been doing. You realize your back is aching, wondering if you should have asked for help in light of the size and weight of the tree and the difficulty of maneuvering it into the hole and holding it upright while refilling the hole. You begin to wonder why you didn’t ask for help, what this says about you, and your relationships with others. Now, the observer part of you has kicked back in, or it has left its merger with the observed part of you and become separate from it again, where it begins to assert to you what it observes.

In both of these ways of describing our “inner conversations,” the percolating idea and the “observed” and “observer” self idea, introspection is about paying attention with intentionality. In the percolation idea, introspection means intentionally deciding which of the bubbles that just percolated you want to pay attention to, to follow, to understand, to expand upon, and which bubbles to ignore, and thereby also gain an understanding of why certain bubbles should be attended and others ignored, for your own personal growth and change. Similarly, in the “observer” and “observed” self analogy, introspection means actively and intentionally deciding what you are observing, of bringing back to your conscious awareness the various acts of planting the tree, why you are doing it, how you are doing it, rather than passively allowing your observer self to fade out and then back in at will. If we decide when we want to pay attention or not pay attention to how we are thinking, feeling or doing, we are doing what some call “mindfulness” practice, which is an important part of introspection. If we are paying attention to our thoughts feelings and actions in order to explore these things and gain a better understanding of ourselves, we are engaged in the act of introspection.

In the next part of this series on introspection, I will discuss the benefits of introspection. Later, I will discuss more about how to actually do introspection, including various tools to help you improve your capacity for introspection, like writing, creativity and deeper conversations with ourselves and others.

Copyright, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are only intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

Where does moral conviction originate? Does it come from within? Is it instilled in us from something external? How does it arise? Do we need to pay attention to it, foster it, grow it, encourage it, for it to gain strength? Or, does it exist of its own accord, making itself known when the time is right? What is the value of moral conviction? What are its costs? What happens when we pay attention and act on our moral convictions? Conversely, what happens when we lack moral conviction, or maybe worse, when possess it but ignore it?

Now, to the task of getting some answers to these thorny questions. More importantly, and perhaps a bit more thorny given the subject matter, to do so without sounding preachy!

This question about the importance of moral conviction threw itself upon my thoughts recently while re-reading “The Brothers Karamazov” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Translated by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky). I will share with you the passage that got me thinking about moral conviction. Before I do, I will give you the context of the passage. The character involved is Alyosha. He is a young man living in a monastery in Russia in the 1800s. His mentor, another monk, has told him he needs to leave the monastery for a while, to live in the world, to be among those outside the protection of the monastery who struggle with the realities of life, including temptation, confusion, tragedy. Shortly before the passage I am about to offer, Alyosha’s mentor (the Elder) has died, throwing Alyosha into an almost unbearable grief. The passage takes place just as Alyosha has an epiphany while praying over the coffin of his beloved mentor.

Again the coffin, the open window, and the soft, solemn, distinct reading of the Gospel. But Alyosha did not listen to the reading. It was strange, he had fallen asleep on his knees, but now he was on his feet, and suddenly, as though thrown forward, with three firm rapid steps he went right up to the coffin. His shoulder brushed against Father Païssy without his noticing it. Father Païssy raised his eyes for an instant from his book, but looked away again at once, seeing that something strange was happening to the boy. Alyosha gazed for half a minute at the coffin, at the covered, motionless dead man that lay in the coffin, with the ikon on his breast and the peaked cap with the octangular cross, on his head. He had only just been hearing his voice, and that voice was still ringing in his ears. He was listening, still expecting other words, but suddenly he turned sharply and went out of the cell. He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly down; his soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars…. Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He did not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it all. But he kissed it weeping, sobbing and watering it with his tears, and vowed passionately to love it, to love it for ever and ever. “Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears,” echoed in his soul. What was he weeping over? Oh! in his rapture he was weeping even over those stars, which were shining to him from the abyss of space, and “he was not ashamed of that ecstasy.” There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over “in contact with other worlds.” He longed to forgive every one and for everything, and to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all men, for all and for everything. “And others are praying for me too,” echoed again in his soul. But with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were, tangibly, that something firm and unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his mind— and it was for all his life and for ever and ever. He had fallen on the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a resolute champion, and he knew and felt it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. And never, never, all his life long, could Alyosha forget that minute. “Some one visited my soul in that hour,” he used to say afterwards, with implicit faith in his words. Within three days he left the monastery in accordance with the words of his elder, who had bidden him “sojourn in the world.”

Here we have at play all of the questions I asked above, and more—that is the nature of Dostoevsky, very dense stuff, but rich, so rich! I highly recommend it. In this scene, Alyosha has an encounter with what will be a lifelong powerful and revelatory moral conviction. Much of the remainder of the book will explore the nature, the extent, and the power of that moral conviction and its impact on Alyosha, who ends up being the central character of the whole book. This is at least part of the nature of moral conviction: it is often not entirely clear what it means, or where it will lead us.

I take this passage to mean, and I copied it here for you because I happen to agree with it: that moral convictions, even when very powerful, are not always clear in their meaning or eventual use. What is more important in the moment at which we realize their existence is that moral convictions give us the power to act in accordance with the message of that conviction at that time, which is often necessary and important when we are faced with a very difficult situation, when we likely would not act the way we do without the moral conviction telling us we must. This is when we know somewhere deep inside ourselves there is a “right thing to do” and a “wrong thing to do.” So we rise above our instincts for self-protection, we risk much because to do otherwise would cause us the shame of ignoring what we now cannot deny, even if we can ignore, the “right” course of action.

And so, the cost of ignoring moral conviction is to shrink from taking action that may lead to the risk of struggle, to stand up for, or against, the prevailing winds, the tide, the current, by taking the path of least resistance, the safe course, which will eventually lead to a kind of moral humiliation, from which we end up running, expanding the negative consequences of acting against what we know to be right for us and the world we live in. I have in this discussion unintentionally yet essentially zoomed in on an overall theme I first raised in my blog post called “Defining Morality.” There I noted that many clients come to me after years of making decisions inconsistent with their own moral compass. Here I am saying there are important moments, moments when our convictions tell us the direction we believe we should take, which give us “waypoints” along our moral navigation that we have chosen to heed or to ignore. Moral convictions are like arrows at the forks of our moral road. We can still choose to take any decision we want, ignoring those arrows, but at the risk of becoming lost along the way, and having a great and difficult time getting back to the “right” path (for us), especially if we choose to ignore many of those arrows over time.

There can be a danger to paying attention to our moral convictions without due consideration. We must not blindly follow what we might think is the right course in the moment merely because it feels strong, feels like a moral conviction. What if what we think is a moral conviction leads us to ruin, to make bad decisions, to act contrary to otherwise sensible behavior in a very serious way? For situations in which the course is ambiguous, and the stakes are high, I have a few thoughts on this, which come down to three things: intent, prudence and humility. If we focus on the why of a thing we do before we do it, we are so much less likely to make the mistake of thinking a thing is moral conviction when it is actually something more base, something self-serving. The intention question is rather simple (but still not always easy to answer): Will I be doing this thing (insert action you intend to take) because I truly, honestly, deeply believe it to be the right thing to do? If so, can it really be a mistake? Prudence suggests we don’t just ask this question quickly, in passing, but give it real thought, seek support, guidance, objective viewpoints, and all the while “dig deep,” “know thyself,” “make a searching and fearless moral inventory” of your reasons, before acting. Finally, make sure you understand the consequences that may arise, and know that you are willing to live with those consequences because you feel you must in order to act in accordance with your convictions. This is where humility comes in: knowing that the limits of what seems important to you is not always important to others, knowing that the risks you are willing to take for yourself doesn’t mean you should risk negative consequences that will befall others, knowing that you are prone to mistakes as everyone is, which is why seeking the views of others is prudent.

The passage above from The Brothers Karamazov makes it pretty clear that Alyosha’s moral conviction came to him from an outside source: “’Someone visited my soul in that hour,’ he used to say afterwards.” I take here no position on whether moral convictions come from internal or external sources. That is not my role. That is for you to decide, however you do (see my blog post, “Defiant Morality”). What is more important is that Alyosha noted the moral conviction, his need to leave the Monastery, to follow his mentor’s advice, to go out into the world. His attention to the moral conviction came from within him, regardless of whether its original source came from heaven or anywhere else.

Moral convictions are the deep-seated instincts or tugs we feel when we are at the crossroads of important decisions that will impact the way we feel about ourselves as good people. Paying attention to these moral convictions, while also using the tools of intent, prudence and humility, is very likely to lead you to feel better about yourself tomorrow than you did today, the culmination of which is the capacity to look back to last year, and the previous decade, and your life entire and feel that you have done a good, if not perfect, job paying attention to what you knew to be right when the decision was difficult, when it necessitated you take risks, when you had to struggle to do what was right. Ignoring your moral convictions in order to prioritize short term gains, to avoid conflict, to attain something not as valuable as your self-esteem, will lead to a kind of existence like the trope of Scrooge from a Christmas Carol. The only life worth having is one in which you believe you will be able to look back and say, I did the best I knew how to make the morally right decisions at most points when it required me to pay attention. If you can say that, you will be a person of sound moral conviction. You will be a person rightly proud of your life, your existence, your self.

In my most recent blog post, I charted some of the course of moving into and then out of the victim role as an essential and healthy process for dealing with trauma. I wrote this in part due to a conversation I had with a few therapy colleagues at a conference about trauma and healing. I had asked them, “when can we as therapists know when a victim of trauma has healed from their trauma?” The answer I received was less than satisfactory (to me). One therapist responded, “We can know a client has healed from trauma when they tell us they have healed.” The other therapists at the table liked this response, and agreed wholeheartedly. Like I said, I wasn’t satisfied. While this is certainly something I’d like to believe is true—that I don’t really have to participate in the decision about when someone has “healed” from their trauma (or for that matter any serious emotional issue), and can leave it to the client to decide—I am also concerned that doing so could be harmful to the client if they aren’t seeing things I am seeing and they are inaccurately perceiving their own state of healing as being further along than it really is (e.g. denial of an incomplete healing process to avoid further emotional turmoil or responsibility for change). Premature completion of the healing process could also deprive the client of the very services they sought when they came to see me: professional help in identifying when and how they can truly come to terms (heal) with whatever emotional issue brought them to therapy.

Despite my concerns about a client not seeing aspects of their own unresolved issues, I also want my clients to be fully in control of their investment in the therapy process. They can quit anytime they want. They can decide, regardless of what I might think, that they have sufficiently healed and have the necessary tools to address their emotional issues without further assistance from me. This happens regularly, and I applaud clients who make this decision, hoping only that, if they discover down the road they have more work to do to completely heal, they will contact me or another therapist to resume therapy.

Looking at both sides of this equation, then, the question is, how can both the client and I accurately identify when the client has healed sufficiently from their emotional issues (trauma, grief, depression, or really any difficult life transition) to no longer need my help? I believe there are two telltale signs that answer this question (in most but not all cases):

The client can hold memories of the events leading to their emotional issues without becoming overwhelmed with the emotional impact of the events (I’ll explain this in more detail below); and

The client has at least partially achieved a state of what some call “radical acceptance” or what I prefer to call a state of “grace” about the events and people involved in the situation giving rise to the emotional issues that brought them to therapy.

The first telltale sign of healing from serious emotional issues, including trauma, loss, and difficult transitions, happens when a client can recall the events leading to the emotional issues without in that moment of recollection going back to the way they felt when the events initially occurred. To use more clinical terms, the level of “emotional reactivity” a client feels in the present to the past event is significantly reduced or eliminated. So, when I work with clients who have suffered some kind of trauma, they can have clear memories of at least some of the traumatic events without feeling the trauma all over again.

This is often a slow painstaking process that cannot be rushed. Rushing this process, especially with trauma, can actually make the trauma worse because forcing or encouraging someone to have distinct memories of traumatic events before they are ready, strong enough, before they feel safe enough to do so in their current status and circumstances, can lead to retraumatization. When this occurs, the client suffers even more harm from the initial trauma, because they go through a secondary trauma by having these memories before they are ready. This is part of the reason I put in my book, Firewalking on Jupiter, two chapters on the importance of safety in therapy.

My first ethical principle, more important than any other, is “do no harm.” In order to apply this with clients who have suffered trauma, I do what I can to ensure that our discussions avoid retraumatizing the clients, so they do not suffer more harm than they already have from experiencing the trauma in the first place. Examples of re-experiencing the trauma as trauma can include childhood memories that cause the person having the memory to feel like they are once again the child they were, with the accompanying sense of powerlessness, fear, sense of doom, terror, and hopelessness to avoid the traumatic situation. You can probably imagine there is little benefit, and potentially great harm, to a person who experiences this “reliving” the childhood experience. Part of what makes healing possible is for the person to see themselves as they are now, not lose sight of that, so when they do have memories of traumatic events, they are able to put distance between themselves as they are now and how they were then. Now they have power, they have choices, strengths, resources, relationships, support and cognitive and emotional capacities they didn’t have then, when the traumatic events occurred.

Rushing the process of eliminating emotional reactivity to past events can also lead to a false sense of healing, which can occur when the client ends up resorting to denial, dissociation or some other form of repression. Ideally, if real and relatively complete healing has occurred, the client will be able to be both open to whatever emotions might come up for them while having the memories of the events, but without feeling those events in the same way they felt those events when they originally occurred. I can at any time conjure up memories of the abuse I suffered at the hands of my father when I was a child, feel sad for the child version of myself for having been subjected to that abuse, but without that memory changing my current mood state or overidentifying with myself as a child so I get lost in the memory and the feelings I had when I was a child. I have been able to do this only after years of therapy and then more years of continuing self-reflection and proactive growth around my own issues.

Let’s now move on to explain the second telltale sign of real healing from trauma and other difficult emotional issues. In an article in Psychology Today, this is the definition of “radical acceptance:” “Radical Acceptance means completely and totally accepting something from the depths of your soul, with your heart and your mind. You stop fighting reality. When you stop fighting you suffer less.” Acceptance of what has happened to you that caused your current emotional difficulties is certainly part of the healing process. Often, this kind of acceptance is enough. In the case of loss, especially when that loss is the result of being wronged in some way, this is not enough, and this is where “grace” comes in. When I think of grace, I mostly think about what might be the greatest statement of grace ever made (to my knowledge anyway). It is from the New Testament, when Jesus was on the cross and the bible says he looked down at the people celebrating his utterly cruel, unfair, and senseless execution by crucifixion, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” Amazing level of grace.

Grace occurs when we allow ourselves to let go of our feelings of anger, resentment, bitterness, vitriol, which are all based on negative judgments about someone else. Grace is more than just letting go, though, because with grace, we are letting go of negative judgments even though those judgments accurately describe the person about whom the judgments are made. In other words, we allow ourselves to let go of these negative feelings and judgments even when the person deserves to have these negative feelings and judgments directed at them. We do it for us, for our peace of mind, so we can move on. We do not do it for them, but we do it, we obtain grace, by accepting completely that the other person is who they are, and there can be no changing that, and we can hope that they might change, or stop doing what they did.

A common example of this kind of grace, as a goal to healing, is with a therapy client going through a divorce, in which it seems accurate to say that person other than my client made decisions that were the most obvious and immediate reasons for the divorce. Maybe they had or continue to have an affair, which destroyed the marriage. Maybe they have an addiction issue that brings harm to the marriage, to themselves, to the entire family, and they refuse to stop their addictive behavior and the only way to reduce the harm to the rest of the family is for my client to end the marriage and isolate the addictive person from the children and from themselves. I have on many occasions watched clients go through the very difficult, yet entirely possible and beneficial process of transitioning from deserved anger and confusion, to acceptance that the marriage needs to end, to an acceptance that the other person either will or will not make the changes necessary to improve their own situation, while my client does what he or she can to improve theirs, without letting the other person keep them in a pattern of entangled resentment, self-doubt, anger, and anxiety, all of which is useless and harmful. They have come to a place of acceptance that looks a lot like: “father, forgive (him or her), for (he or she) knows what they do.” And they have then come to a place of real healing from the divorce and all the problems that initiated it.

I have one last point to make about grace and healing before ending this blog post. Grace does not necessarily mean the same thing as forgiveness, although sometimes they can go together. Grace means: I accept that you are how you are and can let go of my internal negative feelings about you, even though I cannot accept what you did, or think it was okay. Forgiveness means: I am willing to let go of what you did and accept you fully, as if it never happened. You can achieve a state of grace, even without forgiveness. If you care to learn more about forgiveness and letting go, I have explained in much greater detail my thoughts on forgiveness in two chapters in my book, Firewalking on Jupiter.

If a person is able to accept, embrace, move through, and move past the events that led to their emotional issues, no matter how difficult or long that process has become, so that they can remember those events without emotional reactivity and with grace, they will have achieved a post-victim status. This status does not mean they should forget about the events that made them a victim in the first place. It just means they will be able to see themselves as having the power and capacity to chart their own course now, rather than allowing the victimizing events create their choices for them. Post-victim status will allow a victim to discontinue blaming anyone else for their circumstances, so they can take full responsibility and have the freedom to make their own choices, despite the real harm they have suffered.

Copyright, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are only intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

In a recent blog post I discussed the process of “Defiant Morality” leaving for another blog the related process of “Defining Morality,” which will be the topic of this blog post.

Defining Morality might be described as the opposite side of the spectrum from Defiant Morality. Defining Morality is this: “in any given situation, do my choices (in thoughts, words, or actions) involve any moral principles that I need to apply to become closer to a version of myself I can imagine would be the best person I can possibly be (without getting into perfectionism).” Depending on your own sense of who you are as a moral person, these kinds of principles could include things like, “Honesty is the best policy,” or “I know that all my feelings are valid and should be considered and embraced even if I also think they are sometimes based on my own misreading of a situation,” or “the starting point of everyone’s lives are random and arbitrary, not chosen, so I will never assume that anyone is inherently better or worse than I am or each other outside of how they and I act in our lives (e.g. racism is wrong).” These kinds of ideals (and many others) can then be used to start to form a way to “define yourself” as a moral being, using outside influences where you deem them appropriate, but only intentionally, after thinking about it, and deciding for yourself which principles apply to you, not merely because they have been handed to you.

In some ways, I am already applying the ideas of Defining Morality in my therapy process by encouraging clients to incorporate ideal moral versions of themselves in the way they think about their personal growth and emotional well being. Near the beginning of therapy, I use a set of questions (areas of inquiry) to get to know a client. I call the questions, my “Diagnostic Interview” (for more information about my therapy process overall and the Diagnostic Interview specifically, see my chapter, “The Therapy Process” in my book, Firewalking on Jupiter). One area of inquiry in the Diagnostic Interview is simply: “Personal Values.” I ask the client to give me a list of their “personal values.” I try to leave the inquiry as undefined as I can, to avoid creating an answer for the client. I want them to be as open to the question as possible, to get their very individualized sense of what matters to them most. If they need some guidance to make sense of the question, “what are your personal values” I sometimes add, “just tell me what you think is important about being a good person, about living a good life, of the kinds of things you think people should do?” See how this relates to “Defining Morality?” In asking them this question at the beginning of therapy, I am asking them to keep in mind what kind of person they aspire to be, regardless of the particular mental health issues they may have come to therapy to address.

Here is a visual of the layout between Defiant Morality and Defining Morality:

ßStarting Point———————————————————————Life’s Goalà

Defiant Morality————————————————————–Defining Morality

(What I won’t Do)————————————————————–(What I will do)

(Who I am not)———————————————————————–(Who I am)

(Wrong/Bad)———————————————————————-(Right/Good)

So, what does Defining Morality have to do with Mental Health? Quite some time ago, in one of my first blog posts (“What is Mental Health?”), which is now a chapter in my book, Firewalking on Jupiter, I defined mental health as “a state in which a person is able and willing to address every aspect of their inner life, regardless of whether they experience difficult feelings, including fear, while addressing those aspects of their inner life.” I have also said in various places, and often explain during the first few sessions of therapy, that the primary source of nearly all mental health issues is this: adverse psychological and emotional consequences that result from a person’s attempts at denying some aspect of themselves, which could include their identity, personality and history. I will now add this to the equation: they are often running, hiding, denying, or avoiding their sense of moral acceptability.

All of us have a very deep and basic sense of the kind of person we should be. This is not quite the same as our identity, which I define as who we think we are. What I am talking about here is our sense of moral idealism applied to ourselves as we are right now, and how far that is from the kind of person we think we should be. It is our “aspirational self:” what do we aspire to be in order to be able to say we are who we should be. Now, let me add one last ingredient, to ensure we are talking about morality as something more than merely what we do: the aspirational self asks the question: “how do I need to be in my life in order to say I am a good person, rather than a bad person?” I know this almost sounds like something a child would ask themselves, which is just about right, because I said that this a very basic and deep set of questions we ask ourselves. The very deep nature of the questions stays with us our whole lives, from early childhood to our deaths. These questions about ourselves, about what we need to do in our lives to be a good person, they never go away. They are always there, in the background of every decision we make, from the big ones like what kind of career do I want, to the small ones like budgeting our finances. That is partly what makes these kinds of questions so troubling, and why avoiding them can cause so many problems. This is also the reason moral aspirations applied to ourselves is at the heart of mental health, and mental health issues.

If we have to constantly question whether every decision we make leads us toward being a better (good) person or a worse (bad) person, you can imagine the cumulative effect if you have a nagging feeling that there is a lot of cumulative unanswered, unresolved, or worse, suspiciously troubling decisions over time a person might have made. It can be a long, frightening and often shame-filled trip from, “I am a good person who has great ideas of how I want to live my life” to “I have not lived the life I thought I would or should and have become a kind of person I didn’t want to be and never thought I would be.” Often, clients will not want to look at this journey, this path, this set of decisions because they have concluded it is too late to retrace all their steps, to significantly change their course, that it is hopeless. You might think I am exaggerating the problem. Think of the millions who would rather continue escaping their lives through the relationships they have formed with alcohol, or drugs, or casinos. Think of how often you are surprised reading in the news that someone who seemed at all levels like they really had their act together, gets arrested for having committed fraud for years in their business. Think of all the unfortunate people who take these issues so seriously, who have come to the conclusion that they will never be the kind of person they want to be, think they should be, that they take their own lives. What so many of these people do not realize is that they do not have to retrace every single decision they might feel bad about and somehow resolve them. Their attempt alone at tackling the larger decisions that continue to plague them, along with making new decisions along a path more consistent with their ideal moral self, will go a long way toward helping them feel so much better about themselves, so they can begin to forgive themselves for their past moral transgressions by recognizing they are human, we all make mistakes, and the most important part of healthy self-worth is the attempt toward doing the right thing, whatever that may be and however individually defined.

When I am meeting with a client who is suffering from all the emotional turmoil that necessarily follows someone they know having committed suicide, I tell them suicide is based on at least one simple, tragic mistake: the person who killed themselves had come to the mistaken conclusion that whatever was causing their intolerably deep pain would never go away and there wasn’t going to be anything they themselves or anyone else could do about it. I suppose the only exception to this might be an assisted suicide when someone is terminally ill, but that isn’t the kind of suicide I am talking about here. I am talking about suicide that occurs with someone who is otherwise physically healthy. This kind of suicide is often, if not always at some level, the result of the person concluding they are not the kind of person who can overcome whatever emotional circumstance they have either encountered or created. From a morality perspective, think about it this way, it’s pretty unlikely a person would commit suicide if they thought, “I am a good, strong person, just the kind of person I want to be, should be, and I have the capacity to deal with whatever life throws my way because I am not afraid to face all aspects of my inner self and I know how to make good decisions for myself and the people I care about.” In other words, morality is at the core of being mentally healthy because it gives us a profound sense of our capacity to address any kind of adversity, any circumstance, without losing our ability to be the kind of person we think we should be. What makes this so important to being mentally healthy is that if we feel this way about ourselves, we will have no reason to believe we need to run, hide, avoid or deny any part of who we are or how our lives are going because we will know we have the capacity to address it and still feel good about ourselves no matter how difficult the issue.

Now that I have established a brief but (I hope) solid basis for the belief that morality as we apply it to ourselves is a fundamental aspect of overall mental health, let’s get back to the topic at hand, which is what I mean by “Defining Morality.” We can begin with some questions that can help us understand how to apply the idea of Defining Morality in our lives. For any decision you face, you are already asking yourself, “will doing (this or that) get me closer to the kind of person I think I should be?” You might think you are not asking this, but I believe you are, always, every time, somewhere in the background. You may not know you are asking it, but it is there. In order to be able to answer this question, regardless of the nature, the magnitude, or the immediacy of the decision you face, you must first know what you mean by “the kind of person I should be,” which is exactly what Defining Morality is all about.

Try this, imagine yourself, right now, being exactly the kind of person you think you should be. Forget about whether you think it is possible. We are shooting for gold here, for perfection, knowing it is not possible. This is the ideal of who you are as the best person you can be. What comes to mind? What kinds of things about being a good person really matter to you? There are the usual suspects that we all (okay most of us) would include. Things like “I’d be honest all the time” and “people would remember me as someone who cared deeply about them.” For you, it might be more specific, like a goal for a legacy. Some people want to be remembered for their accomplishments, which is perfectly fine. The only caveat I’d add is this (and this comes dangerously close to the kind of moral pronouncements I said I would not make in my writings on “Defiant Morality”): whatever you want to accomplish, even if you believe it is for the greater good, must be justifiable on it’s own, not just based on what it gets you. Or, as Immanuel Kant put it, at least when dealing with other people, you should always treat them as an end in themselves, never as only a means to an end. I would add to this that we shouldn’t be treating people or anything that can feel pain (e.g. animals) as solely a means to an end, but I digress. Whatever kind of questions you can create to get a better sense of your ideal moral self is the very process of Defining Morality.

I may have mentioned this elsewhere, but I can’t remember now, and anyway it’s good for illustrating the topic of Defining Morality, so I will risk repeating myself. When my son was about 12 he asked me, “Dad, what do you want me to be when I grow up?” Although it was a typical question for a child to ask their parent, I was completely unprepared. I know, lame. Anyway, I told him it was an important question and I’d need to think about it. Some time later (we are talking hours, or maybe a day or two), I had the answer I wanted to give him. I told him pretty much in these words, “When you grow up, I want you to be as compassionate as you can with yourself, any other person, and any animal that can feel pain; I want you to be as honest with yourself and others as you can be as often as you can be; and I want you to be interesting. How you do these things is up to you, but if you do all three of these things, you will be what I want you to be when you grow up.” In telling him these things, I can now see I was giving to him my own sense of a broad but fundamental version of my own Defining Morality. I can now see that these are the very basic aspects of what it means to me for me to be a good person, the best person I can be, and was just telling him I wanted the same thing for him. The closer I can get to “perfect compassion,” “perfect self-awareness and honesty,” and “being meaningful,” knowing all the while I will never completely get there, that I will stumble along the way and do things I later recognize as more wrong than right, continue to be strong principles in the decisions I make. Of course these are my values, and you need to find yours. That’s the whole point of Defining Morality. Maybe I should have called it “Defining Your Morality.” A morality, or moral structure that is part of how you define yourself, is what I mean.

Being aware of whatever defines you as your ideal moral self, forcing yourself to keep this in mind for as many of the decisions in your life as you can, even and perhaps most importantly when doing so is particularly difficult, will help you grow stronger, and believe more fully in your capacity to overcome any adverse situation without losing the most important parts of who you think you should be. Keeping questions of Defining Morality in your mind as often as you can will help you eliminate the need to engage in all the unhealthy behaviors that come with avoiding yourself. In the process, the picture of your ideal moral self will become increasingly clear, and hopefully easier to believe in, all the while knowing it is an ideal, and therefore never completely attainable. Lastly, having this goal, this ideal you are trying to achieve, is also a great way for us all to come to a better understanding of what gives our life meaning, of what really matters and what doesn’t. Knowing this will not only help us become “better” versions of ourselves (however we choose to define what that means for each of us), it will almost certainly help us attain more satisfaction with our lives. What could be a more meaningful goal than this for yourself: “I want to be the best, most good, person I can” (especially when you get to define what that means for you)!

Copyright, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are only intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

This is a modified version of a chapter in the book I wrote about my childhood. The book is called, “Twelfth Child.” It is not published, but now and then I use parts of it when I speak and bits and pieces of it have shown up here as part of blogs and in other places on this website. I recently spoke at a nonprofit that does human services work, including therapy, for marginalized populations (a very strong passion I continue to share). I used this as a handout for part of that presentation. I thought I’d share it as a blog here for those who might be interested in part of the reason I get so much meaning out of doing therapy and therapy-related work. Here is the chapter:

There are real heroes out there. I know. I’ve met them. I don’t mean celebrity heroes we never meet. I mean personal heroes—people who intervene when there is trouble in our lives. A hero has a choice, and does not do what they do for recognition. A hero is not a hero without the desire to act when there is no reason they should act, save necessity. According to the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, it is the nameless heroes which deserve the greatest praise of all—those that do the right thing, not out of hope for recognition, or because they think they are supposed to, but because it simply feels like the right thing to do. A hero helps someone else live a better life because that’s the kind of person they are. That’s it.

I cannot remember the names of all the heroes that have come into my life, and feel guilty for that. They deserve to be remembered, and much more. Those that do stand out in my memory stand out for good reason. These I call my personal heroes; not heroes to you, or maybe anyone else but me, but heroes they are, all of them.

In second grade, school staff must have noticed something was very wrong inside Michael Kinzer’s little head. Michael was a constant distraction for the teacher, seemed always to be getting into fights with lots of different kids, and never did what he was told. Michael was usually very far away, in a different world. Something was wrong, and needed intervention. Enter a counselor. He was a man. Nice, good looking, maybe 30 to 40. I can’t really remember. He came to my school on Tuesday mornings. I never saw him around at any time other than when he came to see me. He took me out of class every week and spent an hour with me. I told him nothing about what my father was doing to me. I knew the consequences too well. I wanted him to come, to show me how to throw a baseball, or just sit and talk on the playground. I have no idea what we talked about. I knew he was very worried about me. It never occurred to me that there was anything he could possibly do stop the beatings at home.

In third grade, the school nurse became a small hero for a day, in a way. My shoes had been canvas tennis shoes at one time. Now they were flip flops, with the canvas ripping from the rubber souls. It was dead winter, and my feet were wet and freezing every day after recess. The school nurse either noticed, or a teacher told her. She called me down to her office to take me shopping for new shoes. I pleaded with her not to do it, telling her my parents would buy me new shoes. She insisted. I had never bought new shoes before. I was thrilled, though scared of my father’s reaction, and my brothers’ jealousy. I was told to pick any pair I wanted. Consumer freedom tasted good. All my clothes and shoes had always been bought for me, or were hand-me-downs. The raised tendons on my feet today continue to tell the tale of shoes always a size or a year too small for my growing feet. At home that night, I was beaten so badly my father couldn’t let me go to school for a few days. I don’t know if there were inquiries or not. When I did get back to school, no questions were asked. I was glad to have a new pair of shoes. Getting beat was worth it. Heroes reappeared now and then, but never with enough power, information or concern to do much of anything about what must have been fairly obvious.

Heroes also come from places you might least expect. More than anyone else, my brother Paul, three years older than me, helped to protect me from my father. Again and again, he took beatings onto himself to help me get away, knowing that he was bigger and could partially defend himself. He may also have known that my father didn’t question Paul’s heritage and the beating would not be as severe as what my father had intended for me, the outcast, the abomination. Either way, of all my siblings, Paul deserved a special heap of praise for his courage.

Heroes can be dangerous, because they don’t always know they have the power to do only enough to leave you worse than you were before you met them. After my mother left when I was 12, we were told to go to a counselor at Catholic Charities. I went, but didn’t want to. The counselor convinced me that I was safe in telling him anything that was going on. I did. Boy, what a huge mistake. I remember telling him everything I could within the short time I had, hoping he would put a stop to it, and get me out of that house. I pleaded with him not to tell me dad, warning him that I would be beaten if he did. He did anyway. He told me he didn’t believe me, that I must be lying to him, and that my father had the right to know the kinds of things I was saying about him. Need I say what happened then, when my father brought me home? Of course I was beaten for it, and never went back.

One name I will not ever forget: Lorene. It is no exaggeration to say I would likely not be here to tell you this story if it were not for Lorene. Or, if I were here, I might be scratching this story out on pads of paper in a prison cell or a padded cell. Thank God for Lorene. Lorene was my social worker from the age of 12 until I was 18. She saved my butt so many times I cannot tell you. When my mother left, all hell broke loose. My father’s violence became homicidal. I knew it was only a matter of time before he would kill me. My brother Paul was the first to go into foster care, with the rest of us quickly to follow. The first time I met her, I called her on a pay phone, after my father had tried to hit me in the head with a baseball bat. He had wanted to kill me. He missed me entirely, this time. I told Lorene baseball bat and said I would never return. She suggested we meet at a restaurant. We talked over a dinner. She believed everything I told her, without hesitation, or suspicion. She intervened once and for all by removing me from my father’s house within a few weeks, and was smart enough not to let him know that I had anything to do with her intervention. She was discreet. She seemed to understand the possible consequences of being careless when it came to what my father knew and didn’t know. The County forced me to return home when I was 15, but Lorene kept a close watch on my father, and when he tried to cut me in the neck with a wood saw, removed me from my father’s home again, permanently.

Sometimes a hero becomes a hero when they help you find other heroes. Lorene did this, by introducing me to the foster parents I would have from the age of 16 until I completed my first year of college. Carol and Russ were the real deal—Russ had lived in foster homes as a child and was now returning the favor. Carol was a naturally very giving person and derived much of the meaning from her life by helping kids like me get a chance to succeed in their lives. We are still in contact on a fairly regular basis nearly 30 years after I moved out. What was special about them? I never had any doubt about their motive. In previous foster homes, I had known parents in it for the money (by cramming five boys into two smallish bedrooms out of sight of the rest of their biological family), in it for the work (by making us cut and stack wood without pay every other weekend so they could sell the wood for extra money), or for the control (by kicking me out when I did not want to be adopted). Carol and Russ were none of these. They were simply heroes, doing what they could to improve the lives of the kids in their home, at great personal cost, which was rewarding to them just because they knew they were doing something important, something special.

A few years ago, I called Lorene at her office. I told her who I was, not even sure she’d recognize the name. She knew who I was immediately. I called her to thank her for all that she had done on my behalf. I also told her what I had done with my life to that point (family, house, successful career as an attorney, and sane). I told her I wanted her know it could not have happened but for her. She cried. I cried. It was very very nice.

Personal heroes mattered to me because they came into my life at exactly the right time—when I needed them most. I could not have been helped by any personal hero, though, unless I were willing to trust them. I only trusted those mentioned here because I believed each of them genuinely cared. I wasn’t always right in those I trusted, but I would not have trusted any of them if I thought they were bogus, pretending to care. When those that really cared reached out to me, I am so glad I responded by using what they had to give to improve my life. I hope you will do the same when you need to.

Copyright, 2012, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.